Chapter 606: What He Decided

The cadre was gone. The trees had stopped moving.

Lancelot stood at the edge of the churned ground with the broadsword low and looked at Vane, and Vane understood that the sentence Ormond had cut off an hour ago was still waiting, and that it was going to be finished now.

"I didn’t get to say it," Lancelot said.

"No."

"I’ll say it once."

Nobody moved. Isole had Mara against her side. Ashe stood with her odachi point-down in the dirt. Anastasia had not taken a single step since he stood up from his knee.

"The fox took me through the dead worlds," Lancelot said. "Past the ovals where the ground’s been emptied. There’s always a house near the edge. There’s always something left on the floor. In the first one it was a toy. Wooden. Paint worn off one side from being held."

Vane’s chest went tight. He had stood in a house exactly like that, in Ossara, and never told anyone.

"I’ve stood in eleven of those houses," Lancelot said. He looked at Ashe. "Your continent burned itself to keep them from taking it. Mine didn’t have enough land to burn." He looked back at Vane. "Every Authority on this side of the boundary was paid for by somebody on the other side. The Empire doesn’t own anything it didn’t take first."

"Lancelot—"

"I’m going to end it." Flat. The way he said everything. "Not the Emperor. Not the Household. The whole thing. The Blessed World, and the system that lets a child be born with a principle of reality in his chest while a child one door over is born owing it to him." He paused. "I’m going to walk the road my mother walked, all the way to the end, and when I get there I’m going to come back through the boundary and take it apart."

The clearing was very quiet.

"Come with me," he said.

Vane had known it was coming. It still went through him like cold water.

He thought of the toy. He thought of Rowe on a doorstep. Aldern, where eleven people walked out of a town that no longer existed. Ashe’s scorched continent. Every argument Lancelot had just made was one Vane had watched with his own eyes.

He thought of Oakhaven.

"There’s a woman in Oakhaven," Vane said, "who sells bread off a cart on the corner by the tanneries. She’s got no Authority. Neither has her husband, or anybody on that street. They’ve never taken a thing from a Dark World in their lives. They’re lucky if they eat."

"I know."

"They’re the Blessed World too."

"They were never who I meant."

"Doesn’t matter who you meant." Vane’s voice cracked and he let it. "You can’t bring a world down and choose who it lands on. I grew up at the bottom of it. I know exactly who gets hit first when something that big falls."

Lancelot looked at him for a long time.

"Then I’ll be careful," he said.

"You can’t be careful with a world."

"I know," Lancelot said. And he didn’t argue, and that was worse than any argument. "I’m still going to do it."

Vane shook his head. "Then I can’t come."

"I know that too." Something moved behind the red eyes. "I wanted to ask anyway. You’re the only one I wanted to ask."

Anastasia made a sound.

It was small. She was looking at him the way she had looked at him in the Iron Cathedral in first year, across a floor he had just finished taking apart, except that her father was the thing he had just promised to take apart.

Lancelot turned to her.

He opened his mouth.

And the air in the clearing stopped moving.

It came down from above — the air first, then the treeline, then the ground under every foot at once — and Vane knew what it was before his body finished understanding that it could no longer move. He had felt one in a ballroom.

His father walked out of the trees.

[Name: Varian][Rank: 9 (Transcendent)][Authority: The Unwritten (SSS)][Danger: Error]

He walked through a Domain that held six Expert-rank fighters as still as furniture, and he did not look at any of them. Not even his son.

Lancelot was still standing. The Domain pressed on him the same as everyone — the sword arm lower than he’d have chosen, the stance deeper — but he stood inside it by his own weight.

Varian stopped four meters from him.

"I felt you cross," he said. "From the boundary. I was already coming." His voice was even. "Then I heard what you told my son."

Lancelot said nothing.

"Take it back," Varian said.

"No."

"You’re a Master with nothing. In one breath." Varian’s eyes went, briefly, to the frozen party behind him — to Vane. To Mara, pinned mid-sob against Isole’s side. To the Emperor’s daughter, straining against a Transcendent’s space to reach the man in front of him. "I know how long the road is from here. I know where it ends. And I just heard where you’re going to walk when you get there."

"Then you know I’m not lying."

"Yes," Varian said. "That’s why I’m sorry."

The Domain contracted.

All of it, from the edges of the clearing down to one line, the way Vane had watched it condense in the ballroom when his father spent everything against the Emperor.

Aimed at a man who had been a Master for ten minutes.

Lancelot saw it coming. Vane saw his face in the half-instant before it arrived, and there was no fear on it. There was a yard of cracked stone. A woman between a child and something that started above the top of her world.

He raised the broadsword anyway.

The fox was there.

Between them — not arriving, present — and behind her, for the first time, Vane saw the nine. Vast and pale, unfurling like the wake of something surfacing from very deep water. The Usurper did not return Error for them. It returned nothing at all.

Varian’s strike met the tails.

The ground under the fox dropped half a meter in a perfect circle. Two of the nine came apart into light and re-formed, slower. Her feet gave. The amber in her eyes went bright and strained.

She held.

"Go," she said, not turning around.

Lancelot’s eyes went across the clearing — past Vane, to Anastasia, every line of her fighting the Domain to cross the ground between them.

"Nobody stepped in front of her," the fox said. "Someone is stepping in front of you. Go."

He went.

The fox went with him — present, then not — and Varian’s strike, with nothing left in front of it, went into the earth and split the clearing forty meters to the treeline.

The Domain lifted.

Vane’s knees hit the soil. Anastasia got halfway to the fissure and stopped at its edge, alone, looking north into trees that held nothing.

Varian stood where he had struck, looking at the gash in the ground.

Then he looked at the people on this side of it — his son, a crying girl with a ledger, a princess at the edge of a fissure, five fighters getting slowly to their feet.

He didn’t explain. He didn’t have to. Vane had just heard the same thing he had.